Hey DN, I wrote my thoughts on how I’ve been feeling about work and inspiration. They came to me after a period of burnout that led me to go freelance and take control over how I work. I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether any of this resonates.

At Made by Many we haven’t adopted the term Full Stack Designer (we definitely have Full Stack Developers) however, we do believe that a full stack designer is someone who can contribute at every stage in the product development process. This is inclusive of research, synthesis, usability testing, prototyping, visualisation, and user interface design or production design. We don’t believe this should include the ability to code, which is perhaps part of the reason we’re reluctant to start calling our design team full stack designers.

In my experience FontExplorer is bloated software with a plethora of barely used features. In the end it basically becomes a slightly more organisable FontBook where I get to turn some fonts on an off. Haven’t tried RightFont yet but it looks like it has some really good features that will bring glyph selection to Keynote and Sketch.

If this is a first release of this product then you can’t deny that it looks very slick. Obviously, much of that can be attributed to Slack’s design. As product designers I’m sure the first priority was to ship a working product to get it tested in the gaming community. With this in mind, it makes sense that they would take tried and tested user interface patterns from successful communication tools like Slack whilst making modifications to suit their specific users’ needs.

I’m interested to see how the product evolves in the future, if it gains traction with the gaming community then no doubt the UI will require more unique solutions to be designed/developed as the product designers begin to understand their users’ needs better.

Rather than simply talk about nice combinations you could explore why certain fonts work together and how to find good combinations. This would then arm readers with the knowledge of how to create their own combinations for any project. For example, you could give advice like ‘when matching serif and sans-serif fonts look for two fonts with similar x-heights’.